Cloud computing relates to the sharing of computing resources that are generally accessed via the Internet. In particular, cloud computing infrastructure allows users to access a shared pool of computing resources, such as servers, storage devices, networks, applications, and/or other computing-based services. By doing so, users, such as individuals and/or enterprises, are able to access computing resources on demand that are located at remote locations in order to perform a variety of computing functions that include storing and/or processing computing data. For enterprise and other organization users, cloud computing provides flexibility in accessing cloud computing resources without accruing up-front costs, such as purchasing network equipment and investing time in establishing a private network infrastructure. Instead, by utilizing cloud computing resources, users are able redirect their resources to focus on core enterprise functions.
In today's communication networks, examples of cloud computing services a user may utilize include software as a service (SaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) technologies. SaaS is a delivery model that provides software as a service rather than an end product. Instead of utilizing local network or individual software installations, software is typically licensed on a subscription basis, hosted on a remote machine, and accessed as needed. For example, users are generally able to access a variety of enterprise and/or information technology (IT) related software via a web browser. PaaS acts as an extension of SaaS that goes beyond providing software services by offering customizability and expandability features to meet a user's needs. For example, PaaS can provide a cloud-based developmental platform for users to develop, modify, and/or customize applications and/or automate enterprise operations without maintaining network infrastructure and/or allocating computing resources normally associated with these functions.
Within the context of cloud computing solutions, data access and presentation methods have become an important tool for users and application developers when creating enterprise applications. As used herein, a time-based data structure refers to a data structure (e.g., table or other data store) that has records containing information that changes over a time period. That is, information in logically adjacent records may represent a transaction history representative of the life-cycle of something that persists for a time period being maintained in a database (e.g., incident report, purchase request, travel itinerary). The changes over time may be recorded in a single record or multiple different records of the time-based data structure. In a simple case, records are stored logically adjacent to each other and each record (e.g., row) contains information in each field (e.g., column) even if that value has not changed. In other cases, records may contain only changed values and represent a delta (i.e., change record) to the immediately previous record. In some cases, records may contain a key value (or set of values) that may be used to identify records that are related to each other. For example, a data structure may contain a field called “update” which holds a value reflecting an update number that may be incremented when any update is made relative to a related set of records in the data structure. The disclosed techniques for interfacing to time-based information in data repositories represent improvements to address these and other issues.